I have never been caught out by a spoof character or show yet. My spoof radar is pretty much spot on.
I have heard Ricky, Stephen and Karl for 10 years now. If there were a whiff of artifice I would see it and hear it. To keep up such pretence is impossible and to write that quantity and quality of material and play it completely straight is simply impossible.
He is what he is. Does he exaggerate things? yes. Does he say things to wind up Ricky and Stephen? yes. Is he a slightly different person when he isn’t around them? yes…but not by much and no different to the way in which we all do it.
So he is not a “character” he is not a “creation” and has no script.
He is a hairy manc twat with a head like a fucking orange. That much we all know.
One reason you might think that is because Gervais has stolen bits of Karl’s thinking for his standup. One of the podcasts has Karl complaining about the charities which allow you to give a goat to a family in Africa. I was watching a bit of Ricky’s standup the other day, and he repeated some of the lines verbatim.
It’s all in the editing. The fact that Karl let’s himself be filmed and edited this way does suggest that he is either an idiot or just a character or some combination of both. I think he has an interesting insight into the odd situation he is thrown into. In most cases I think he comes off better than more experienced travel experts would. What was he supposed to say in the India episode where the guys rolls his penis up on a stick and then starts twisting it? I would have been very disappointed in some lecture about cultural diversity from a Travel Channel expert. Karl nailed it.
Every group of guys has the one guy who is the butt of all the jokes - the idiot - even if he isn’t actually stupid. That guy gets used to being the butt, even enjoys the role in a way, IMO. Karl is that guy and his two friends happen to be comedians.
I’m not finding the episodes that funny actually. Good travel show fair, but not that funny. Ha, ha - Steve and Ricky booked Karl into a crappy hotel. Ha, ha - Steve and Ricky make Karl wear a funny hat. Ha, ha - Karl gaks and chokes when he has to eat a worm. What would really be funny would be if Karl could come back with Ricky and we could all watch him enjoy the same stuff.
I admit that there is a possibility that it’s all one big put on. But I’ve been listening to Pilkington since 2001. He not only comes off as sincere in his ridiculous statements, but it seems extremely unlikely that he has maintained a false persona so consistently for so many hundreds of hours of public exposure.
Sometimes Karl tells jokes. You can tell when he’s doing that. It sounds entirely different from when he’s just being stupid. Just reading my transcription of what he’s said doesn’t give you the whole picture. You have to hear him say it.
For example, one time Steven and Ricky were listing a bunch of milestones of human evolution, and Ricky mentioned “forward-facing eyes.”
Karl interrupted – “What do you mean forward-facing eyes? You mean, we used to have eyes that looked inside our heads?”
Reading the text as I have written it here, it seems like a simple joke, and not even a very good one. But if you hear him say it, it sounds like he’s genuinely confused.
As Dio says –
He really would have to be some kind of genius as an actor. It’s far more convincing than any put-on that Andy Kaufman ever did.
I really do wonder if there’s some kind of Asperger’s or learning disability. It would go a long way to explaining his trouble with education and understanding simple concepts.
I’m not playing a role. I’m fascinated by Karl and I’ve listened to him in various media over and over. Primarily, I listen because, yeah, of course it’s funny. It’s funny to hear someone being so brilliantly stupid. But I also listen because it doesn’t sound like a scripted character; it sounds genuine.
Yeah, I can’t imagine all this stuff being scripted. If it was a put-on, he’d have to be not only a genuis actor but also a genius improviser.
But if Karl had said “forward-facing eyes” Ricky would have shrieked with laughter and run with a joke about how Karl thought we used to have eyes that looked inside our heads (complete with a funny animation.) That doesn’t make Karl stupid, it just means he is out of his depth is a humor contest with Ricky, backed up by Steve.
That’s exactly it. I believe he’s very much aware of how he comes across and that he knows spouting off and riffing on some of his “stupidity” will elicit chuckles from the audience, the approval of Ricky and Steven, and make for good television, or at least the kind of television Ricky and Steven are looking for. And the lines he comes up with are, as you say, “brilliantly stupid”–they’re not the ramblings of a mere moron–so I really do think he exaggerates his persona for laughs.
I mean, Karl, when it comes down to it, is perfectly happy to travel, to eat worms, to stay in shitty hotels, etc. He seems to, in my impression, actually have a softness and interest in the cultures he is exploring on the show. In my opinion, once again, he does not interact with the cultures in a boorish and purposely condescending manner. He says aloud in a cleverly comedic manner thoughts that a lot of us would actually be thinking in similar situations. I mean, take one example from my “real life”: the thermal baths in Hungary. I love them, but I recall reading one brochure listing all the medicinal properties of these baths and all the types of diseases they are purported to heal. I couldn’t help but thinking: Wait, so I’ll be sharing a warm, damp environment with disease-infested bathers? And this is supposed to be good for my health? That’s exactly the sort of stuff I’d expect Karl to riff on, in a more clever manner.
You’re seeing sincerity where I’m seeing purposeful “stupidity.” For all I know, maybe he really truly is an idiot, but I have my strong doubts. I’ve known characters in my life who did exactly this sort of thing for laughs and attention. Unless you knew them really, really well, you’d think they were sincere and really that stupid.
If you only to Karl from this show and the HBO series, it probably does look like a big put-on. But if you go back to the original podcasts, or even all the way back to the original radio shows, it becomes harder to believe that this is a put-on. Karl is a moron.
I can’t remember whether I brought this up before, but there’s also Karl’s inability to comprehend the concept of a metaphor.
He says that “a stitch in time saves nine” is inapplicable to his life, because he doesn’t sew.
He thinks that Benjamin Franklin’s “waste not, want not” indicates nothing more than Franklin might have been a hoarder. (But he is impressed by Franklin’s “inventing” electricity.)
He thinks that “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” is nothing more than practical advice for people who literally live in glass houses, because they might break their houses if they chuck things about while they’re at home. He surmised that there was a time (after caves and before stonemasonry and carpentry, presumably) when people actually lived in “basic glass houses.” He adds the advice “people who live in glass houses have to answer the door,” because they can’t pretend they’re not home.
Karl is also “annoyed” (his word) by people who like to try new kinds of food. In his view, people should just stick to what they know.
i feel compelled to defend karl yet again. sure, ascenray, he’s dim. he’s ignorant on a lot of things. he may very well believe that “he who lives in glass houses” stemmed from a glass-house encounter from thousands of years ago. i’ll also agree that he probably doesn’t realize that glass is a difficult substance to work with, that to build a house from such requires technical expertise that there was no way that the ancients could have built a house from glass - that such a saying is purely metaphorical.
BUT. if you ask plenty of other people who aren’t well read, don’t know the mechanics of glass, they could very well come to the same conclusion. at least karl has a working hypothesis. there are people out there who, if you ask them “where does the saying ‘he who lives in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones’ come from?” they wouldn’t reply “oh, it’s just a rhetorical hypothetical.” in fact, they wouldn’t reply anything at all, because they can’t even be bothered to even think about the origin. at best, someone would say “confucius said it” and leave it at that.
i mean, there ARE people out there who are dumb. You (ascenray) and I have both agreed to knowing these people. Karl just so happens to be one of those guys… with a pretty good sense of humor. I find nothing sinister, or appalling about the man. Nor do I find anything exceptionally egregious or befuddling about him. My very own mother sees nothing wrong with wiping out mosquitos, slugs, and other garden pests. I’m willing to bet, at certain points in our lives, many of our own mothers, or even ourselves have hoped for the mass extinction of certain creatures. I mean, after all, the dodo went beddy-bye and the world kept spinning.
So really… why not EMBRACE karl instead of constantly pointing out his shortcomings? the naysayers are becoming as annoying as Ricky himself.
But, hell, writing and talking about how stupid Karl says is almost as fun as listening to him being stupid.
And I seriously think there’s something undiagnosed about this guy. I am in this deep and I really want to know if he is autistic in some way. I can’t stop going over the crazy things he has said.
How many people do you know who truly don’t get the concept of a metaphor? Or are actively annoyed by the idea?
What’s the one thing that people know about glass? It’s fragile. I can’t imagine many people who would think that people lived in glass houses before considering any other possibility. I mean, most people do understand the idea of fiction or fantasy or imaginary things, like the gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel.
And I am interested in the continued discussion regarding wehther he is a put-on or a scripted character, or whether he is just a “regular guy.” The question is fascinating to me, so I keep thinking about it, and remembering examples that make me think he isn’t a put-on and he isn’t “normal.”
At least I hope he’s not just a regular guy. He is funny and fascinating and he seems to have developed certain skills to get by in life, but he is a full-on idiot. I might be friends with such a guy, but, like Ricky, I’d give him hell for the idiotic things he said. What I find especially fascinating is that, unlike what I would expect from these theoretical Karl-like friends, Karl doesn’t ever seem to learn.
And I just remembered another example of his weirdness. He’s offended by the idea of excessive choice. He makes his girlfriend do all the shopping, because he gets upset by the variety of options available at the supermarket. He has said that he believes that there should be at most two varieties to choose from of any thing.
I guess I’d have to go back to those–I only know him from “An Idiot Abroad,” and, so far everything described in the last few posts, sounds exactly like the type of stuff one of my (intelligent) friends would say just for laughs. The stuff I’ve found so far is far too perfect to be the ramblings of a mere idiot.
I don’t know what that clip is, but I would be willing to bet a big sum of money that Karl, although perhaps a quirky guy, is playing up the “idiot” character big time. No doubt in my mind whatsoever. It’s not that what he says is so stupid–it’s because it is so brilliant.
And here’s a little bit in The Times that claims “Karl Pilkington himself was the producer of The Ricky Gervais Show on the radio station Xfm and developed a cult following when he appeared on Gervais’s podcasts. His comic speciality is pretending to be thick, a role that he is able to play with immense assurance.”
It doesn’t prove anything, but there’s more than a reasonable amount of doubt as to the sincerity of the persona.
Ricky and Steve reference him all the time in their work. You can definitely see him all over Extras, and Ricky mentions him a lot, occasionally by name, in his stand-up.
Certainly he’s changed a bit now that he’s making money off his personality (though I really believe he’d rather be a paperboy, if it paid the same and he could just do it on sunny days), but for anyone who doubts his authenticity, I suggest you start listening to the Ricky Gervais show on XFM. The entire series is available here, rambling, dead air and all. Karl, the producer, comes in little by little. Once in a while you can tell that he’s actually trying to be funny, instead of just being given a forum to air his grievances and weird theories, and his tone and delivery are completely different. He also brings up the same stories a few times, and again in the podcasts, though usually Ricky or Steve will prompt him and acknowledge that they’re doing it for the benefit of anyone in the audience who hasn’t yet heard of ‘the family that had a horse in its house.’ He also shows occasional bursts of brilliance and, as someone described above, his bigotry (and obsession with the gays) is defended by Ricky because he’s simply too dim to know any better.
Put me in the It’s a character camp. I think he is one hell of an improviser. I have known some truly stupid people, people far to dumb to ever hold a job producing a radio show. And they have never come close to having as many stupid things to say in a day as Karl does in a hour. He just has pretty much no normal opinions at all. Pretty much every single thing Ricky says He has an absurd, yet hilarious view about it. It’s just not possible in my mind that anyone could be wrong about every single thing there is in this world.
